Covered CA: final enrollment nearly 1.4M

UC San Diego senior Megan Germain receives a Covered California flier from Alex Acuna, an organizer with the California Public Interest Research Group which conducted outreach on campus on Oct. 3. Recruiting young adults is seen as a key to the success of the Affordable Care Act.
Christian Rodas

UC San Diego senior Megan Germain receives a Covered California flier from Alex Acuna, an organizer with the California Public Interest Research Group which conducted outreach on campus on Oct. 3. Recruiting young adults is seen as a key to the success of the Affordable Care Act.

Nearly 1.4 million residents picked health plans through the state's insurance exchange by the final open-enrollment deadline, officials said Thursday.

The Covered California exchange also registered 1.9 million new enrollees in Medi-Cal, the health insurance program for the poor.

Altogether, sign-ups for the first year of open enrollment exceeded 3 million -- by far the most successful enrollment campaign for any state in the rollout of the federal Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The 1.4 million figure is also more than twice the 696,000 target that Covered California established in its own projections for the first year of the exchange. And it's significantly more than the 800,000 enrollees predicted by the Congressional Budget Office.

Peter Lee, Covered California's executive director, said Thursday that enrollment activity surged in the first two weeks of April. During that time, 205,685 people chose a health plan through the exchange. On April 15 alone, the last day of an extension to complete enrollment, 50,000 people finished their sign-ups.

More than 1.2 million -- 88 percent -- of those who picked a plan were eligible for federal subsidies, with 29 percent of registrations in the 18-to-34 age range and 28 percent stating that they're of Latino heritage.

The exchange's website, coveredca.com, saw the most activity among the various enrollment methods for Covered California (the other methods were by phone or via certified enrollment representatives). About 41 percent went online and picked a plan through the web portal.

Certified insurance agents were also a huge part of the sign-up effort; they enrolled 39 percent of all the participating consumers.

Sharp Health Plan, the only exchange policy sold just in San Diego County, tallied 13,087 enrollments for 0.94 percent of the state's total enrollment.